Merry Christmas everyone!
In the spirit of the holidays, I’m releasing a free self-published short story!
The story is called “Flying to Tomorrow,” and stars a shy trans man who wants to be a Swarm pilot. He is one step closer to achieving his dream, but will a handsome fellow trainee make his life more difficult?
Short story, 8000 words, m/m
The download link is not quite available, but when it is, you can find it HERE
Happy holidays to everyone reading this right now!
Hello all!
I’m checking in to see how everyone is doing this November and to announce that this year, I am doing NaNoWriMo!
What is NaNoWriMo? It’s short for National Novel Writing Month, and it means that I am attempting to finish writing a novel in a month. In this case, a novel means 50 000 words and a month is 30 days. It’s quite the challenge.
I have made a video log about my NaNoWriMo challenge which you can watch below.
If you want, you can also watch it on Youtube HERE.
I really enjoyed making this vlog for you all, so I hope that you also enjoy watching it.
Good luck to all of you out there who are doing NaNoWriMo. If you want, you can comment about your own project and how that’s going!
Well, now that I’ve done NaNoWriMo, I’m going to wait a bit to do edits on the finished novel myself for a while.
That means I’m starting on a new project. I’ve had a few ideas kicking around inside my head, and it’s starting to become more clear. It looks like I might combine two of the ideas that I had into one.
The first idea was to write a Victorian lesbian detective story in London. I’ve had a few different ideas regarding that, and one of them includes a trans woman private investigator who used to work for Scotland Yard. I haven’t really fleshed the idea out yet, but I was working on it.
The other idea was to write something other than steampunk. I love steampunk, and my NaNoWriMo novel is vaguely steampunk. However, I recently started researching environmental literature, and it gave me the idea to write about something I’m calling “greenpunk.” It’s the idea that using green technology started in the Romantic era and that the Victorians now have working green technology.
I’ve decided to combine the two, and now I’m really excited to start the planning for world-building. I’ve started looking into current green technology and also looking into how some of it could apply to a world with a different twist on technology. It’s surprisingly fun coming up with all sorts of little details about this green world. To be honest, some of it won’t even make it into the book, but it’s fun making it up anyway.
If you know anything about London during the Industrial revolution, I’m sure you can imagine huge factories, lots of soot and smoke, and streets that were dirty and filled with literal crap. Can you imagine it all differently? I think it would be great. But enough about that for now.
So for now, I’ve finished writing on my dragon novel, although I haven’t come up with a title yet. More on that process later, because I have fun making up titles, even though I’m not always the best at it.
I have one novel in the works for publication, although I don’t yet have a timeline on publishing for that. I got the first round of revisions back, and there will possibly be another one.
So that’s what I’m up to for the next month or so. After all that time in the dumps with depression, I feel a bit like a dusty factory that’s finally starting to be cleaned up and used again. Go me!
Anyway, I hope you’re all having fun on your current projects (whatever they may be) because I sure am.
This is it, everyone. The last day of NaNoWriMo 2015. I did it!
Some of us finished in the third week, like my friend Laurence. Some of us were madly writing away on the very last day with only a little bit more to go, like me. Some of us weren’t even close to finishing, but kept on writing anyways.
Congratulations to all of us. It’s a difficult challenge to write 50000 words in just one month. Even the decision to try to write a novel is a hard challenge to face, so I hope that you can look back on your work this month and be proud of yourself for what you have accomplished.
I had an interesting time of it. I wasn’t expecting to follow the set pattern of 1667 words a day, but I’ve stuck to it, which I haven’t done before. This is my third year participating in NaNoWriMo, and in the past, I’ve fallen behind and tried to finish thousands of words in one day. One year I managed to finish, and one year I didn’t. So I’m proud that I made a goal and I stuck to it this time.
This was definitely a year for firsts. This time, not only did I attend a write-in for NaNoWriMo, but I was the one to organize it. Now that I’ve done it once, I think I can possibly do it again.
Also, I did the first third of my writing in the hospital by hand, which was yet another challenge. I think that I’ve done pretty well.
So, yet another year comes to a close. I’ve got an entire 50 000 word novel to revise and get beta readers for. I already have all sorts of additions in mind, and it was difficult not to go and correct them during the writing process. But now I have scads of time to go do that.
So I’ll see you again next year everyone, and until then, I hope you can meet all your writing challenges with determination.
Hey all, great news!
Just a quick, quick announcement so that everyone knows that there is a podcast available for the panel I took part in.
So without further ado, the Evolving LGBTQ+ Romance Genre panel featuring myself, Laylah Hunter, Karelia Stetz-Waters, Austin Chant and moderated by Gunner Scott!
Hey all, as fellow readers and writers, I’m sure you all know what NaNoWriMo is. For those who don’t, National Novel Writing Month takes place in November, and is the undertaken challenge of writing 50000 words in 30 days. It can be a gruelling challenge, especially for those with jobs or university and college classes. However, it is doable, and it can be very fun
.I first took part in the challenge in 2012, and I decided that I was going to write a novel about a vampire on a space station. For those of you who think that sounds familiar, you would be right. My novel Rangers over Regulus was written for NaNoWriMo that year, and it won! Yes, I wrote the last 12000 words on the last day, but I still won. I think my brain might have gone a little loopy, because when I reread chapter 8, I had no memory of having written it. Not only had I won the challenge, I also had a 50k word novel on my hands, writing finished, editing much needed.
In 2013, I didn’t win. I came very very close to winning, but fell short by just over 6000 words. So close! Although I didn’t win, the fact remains that at the end of November, I had 43000 words of a novel already written. And guess what? I finished that novel, and my publisher has accepted it for publication.
My point is, NaNoWriMo gets people writing, and it gets them churning out words by the thousands. Sometimes writers win the challenge – sometimes they don’t. But no matter how much a writer finishes by the end of the month, they have still accomplished something on their latest project, even if it’s finding out that their current project falls apart under pressure.
I’m hoping that this year is once again productive on the writing front, and that by the end of this November, I’ll have a good chunk of my next project finished – hopefully at least 50k words of it. This year, I’m writing about Ignius, an agender dragon and their dragonrider Kathely, who want to join an elite squadron known as Far Patrol. It should be fun to write, although probably won’t be the novel anyone is expecting – me least of all!
Join me on my quest to achieve noveldom!
I’m testosterone-tea on the NaNoWriMo site, and you can follow my progress on Twitter as well.
Hey everyone, there’s two weeks to go, and I’m still doing some last minute preparation for the Gay Romance Northwest meet-up. So while I was at it, I decided that I might as well put up a blog post about preparing for writing conferences, tell you some new announcements for GRNW, and tell you about the events I’ll be participating in for the conference.
Getting ready for GRNW
My preparation for GRNW started ages ago. I’m Canadian, and the conference is in Seattle. That meant I had to renew my passport so that I could cross the border. Also, the friends I’ll be traveling with, J.K. Pendragon and their boyfriend Laurence are also Canadian and needed passports. Luckily, my passport came several weeks ago.
I also needed transport and hotels. I arranged us transport, but it won’t be anything too fancy. We’ll be taking the Beast, which is a 1995 Chevy Silverado. It’s twenty years old and still running well. Also, it seats six people, which is kind of ridiculous, but should fit 3 people, all their stuff, plus merchandise fairly easily. It runs on diesel, so hopefully I can find gas stations along the way that have diesel fuel pumps.
I also had to order merchandise far in advance. Publishers are only too happy to help authors out on the book front. I also have postcards and posters that I have leftover from last year as well as business cards and magnets I ordered brand new for this year.
GRNW also offered authors the option to donate free giveaway books, which my friend J.K. did, as well as swag giveaways for the gift bags.
This year, I’m taking part in a couple of different GRNW activities.
I’ll be one of the readers for the #LoveWins reading event at Hugo House. I’m really excited about this one, because it’s my second ever reading event. My first one was the Read and Write with Pride event in Edmonton. This time, I will be reading from my novel Rangers over Regulus, as I will be selling it at the Book Market after the conference. The other readers will be Edmond Manning, Radclyffe, Anne Tenino, and Yolanda Wallace.
I’ll also be on the last panel of the day at the conference itself, the Evolving LGBTQ Romance Genre. This one promises to be very interactive and dynamic. What is going to happen is that at the very beginning, everyone gets to write down what they think about where the LGBTQ romance genre should go in the future on a sticky note. The wonderful GRNW volunteers will organize your thoughts into themes, and then the last panel of the day will discuss your ideas! This is going to be a really fun panel, and I’m really glad to be part of it!
My fellow panelists will be Austin Chant, who is one of my fellow LT3 authors and also one of the GRNW keynote speakers, Laylah Hunter, and Karelia Stetz-Waters. Our moderator will be Gunner Scott, the Pride Foundation’s Director of Programs.
I’m still preparing for all the events! Discussions with my fellow panelists are still taking place, and I haven’t yet decided what section of Rangers over Regulus I’m going to read from yet.
I might be able to fit a new haircut in before I have to drive to Seattle.
alex powell 